In place of further exposition on Radiohead or their many overpriced rarities ), I’ll include some (polished) text from a recent interview. In ten years Radiohead will occupy the same place in history as Marillion. It could be argued that they already do.
We’ve lost the dichotomy that could have made Radiohead cool forever — the one that made Sonic Youth and so many of their peers cool. We are living in a world of record-collector stadium rock (Bowie/Arcade Fire), a world in which it is much harder to define yourself as authentic or untainted, to be able to say, “We’re not like those phony major label bands.” That war is won: indie bands have as good a shot at success — better, if you consider economies of scale — as the most heavily-backed, manufactured pop stars.
In the broad strokes, indie rock only worked when there was a controlling industry to operate in contrast with. Sans major labels, and the ridiculous rock star behavior they promoted, there is less to rebel against, and since so much of pop’s history has been about contrarian rebellion, you lose the ability to finger point, to align yourself in opposition and be a “punk” or DIY band. The strong-arm media saturation that made Poison and Warrant and Damn Yankees popular created an exaggerated divide, and more and more I think the ignorance of those times — of the people who sold and played and bought such crap albums — was valuable, insofar as it allowed other groups of people to let their guard down around anyone wearing a Black Flag or Bauhaus t-shirt.
“That’s all bullshit, we listen to alternative/college/punk music. We’re in on something.” …there’s a tenuous but nonetheless real defense for that kind of elitism, since there was effort involved. You had to mail away for those records or work out a ride to the cool record store to buy them. Today, everything sells what it really sells (Soundscan), you can get it anywhere (online), and it’s pretty boring. We’ve lost the mystery that allowed independent music to seem “cool.” The same way the internet has broken up the corporate record label shell game, it’s shattered the illusion/delusion of independence from that game. The shadow every indie label, band and fan schemed under — and, most importantly, felt empowered through fighting, or simply ignoring — is gone. In the ’80s it allowed bands like Sonic Youth and especially self-righteous DIY cadres like Beat Happening/K Records, SST and Minor Threat/Fugazi/Dischord to see themselves, to promote themselves, and to be perceived as contras, as rebels, “real” bands that didn’t play bogus image games or act like they’d “made it.” And that line was so overt, it seems like there was a legitimate battle in retrospect, and I see kids believing it today, that prior to Nirvana there was this honorable holy art war, but these bands all enjoyed comparably false — or at least inflated — credibility because of the major label puppet show.
Some background: Before the arrival of Soundscan, charts were based on the number of units shipped. That means all a record company had to do to get an album in the charts — convincing people that it was popular, leading to peer pressure monoculture (“This is what people are listening to, I guess…”) — was ship a massive number of records. The only check/balance we — consumers — had was that returns would be counted against the album. Here’s a classic example: Epic Records ships something like fifty million copies of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous in the winter of 1991, making it the #1 album in America. Then the returns come in, and it goes flying down the charts, because the returns are huge — kids in America that got it for Christmas are returning it, because apart from “Jam” and “Black or White,” it sucks. It eventually sells like thirty million copies worldwide, but the point is, after the Christmas returns on Dangerous, Nirvana’s Nevermind goes to #1, because there are millions of copies of Nevermind in circulation and none of them are being returned to DGC.
The industry had something resembling a system, and in extreme cases it was possible to get an honest result, but there was as tiny an intrusion of reality as the labels could allow while avoiding the appearance of rank corruption. Even at its best, the situation was easily subverted: labels could recoup their investment by “slamming” a big album in — shipping millions, being able to say “The #1 Album in America”— and telling MTV and radio it was huge, even though people might not have been buying it. Once it hit #1 or #3 or whatever, people looked at that and thought, “Man I’m so out of it, how have I not heard this? I have to buy it now!” and this saved the record company from failure, because people started buying the album based on the completely false, hyped position achieved by saturating the marketplace. On a week when they would have expected their most economically painful, large-scale returns on a failing album (the second/third week of release), they protected themselves by using this “slam” shipping practice to get the record’s profile up on false premises.
To the extent that there was a legitimate opposition to this practice, it was because corporations had control of the public consciousness and created an ignorant, peer pressure-driven hair-metal wasteland. And they absolutely did this, they took advantage of the fact that teenagers are generally just looking to fit in, to find an identity and a crowd, and they created an easily controlled and reproduced universe of lion-maned, dolled-up musicians who expressed almost nothing in their music. Unilaterally, the message was: “I want to rock and roll all night, and party every day.” That escapism is attractive to sad and lonely and in many cases uneducated kids, and even to 18–35 year-old people working dead-end factory jobs, waiting for a bell to ring somewhere out there in real America. This metal circus worked to a degree that even the labels couldn’t have predicted: kids in middle America actually began to imitate and emulate hair metal, and by the mid-’80s, moved to L.A. to get signed (Poison, Guns N’ Roses…the list is endless).
The bumper crop of mid-’80s hair-metal bands took aging Hell’s Angels/vague satanism stadium rock— Priest and later Maiden— and, wanting to get more girls in the mix, added the glam/sex-appeal factor. Bon Jovi and the larger pool of poodle bands exploded about 1985 and ran straight through 1990. Funnily enough, this day-glo mid-to-late ’80s phase can be laid at the feet of the same band that influenced the meathead balls-to-the-wall shit that immediately preceded it: Kiss. If you look at Poison and Faster Pussycat and the more fashion-heavy hair metal bands in the late ’80s, most of it looks like Kiss did after taking off their makeup in 1983 (cf. the “Lick it Up” video).
Bands like Mission of Burma, the Minutemen…Naked Raygun — whomever — were saying, in direct and indirect ways, “We don’t care about fitting in, let’s make honest music because we’re not getting any on the radio.” Most of the country — brainwashed, looking to music as a constant party — saw these bands and their fans as depressing, boring losers who didn’t fit in. Some have said differently, but alternative bands, and their fans, enjoyed and eventually profited — in renown if not dollars — by their edgy status. There was an implicit sense of control, too, of ownership, or even just belonging, within this self-policing community, because it had boundaries and some vague rules of conduct…I don’t know if they could be written down beyond the eventually ridiculous straight edge/posicore stuff that took it too far, and showed how stupid it could get, but like everything there was a middle ground where these ideas went as far as they should.
Today, the internet allows people who were intimidated by the scene I’m talking about — by the sneering elitism and “poseur” catcalls — to read up on all these supposedly cool bands and just decide, “I’m cool!” without passing any of the sort of tests that the community had in place. It’s a weird elitist point, but it’s very important to my mind: there is no social element to music anymore. It used to be a filter, a way to sniff around for friends in the confusing maze of adolescence and your twenties. You know, “That girl is so rad…what’s her shirt say? What’s ALL? Fuck I am such a loser.” And then maybe you don’t care enough or have the balls to go out and find an ALL record and listen to it, to wear an ALL shirt to school two months later. Maybe you’ll tell yourself, “Everyone will see through me, I’m such a poseur,” and maybe that’s a valuable lesson, maybe you’re learning something about yourself, about who you really, honestly are, and what you really, honestly like and want to emulate.
The same way you don’t have to do any homework today, you don’t have to confront what listening to a certain kind of music — or even being a certain kind of person — means, because everything is up for grabs. Everything is an advertisement, and not for you or who you are and what you go through, or who you run with, but for something you saw or heard about and want to be associated with. You don’t have to go to a record store to buy it. You don’t have to talk to the snob behind the counter or figure out how to dress so you’re not trying too hard. You don’t have to wait three weeks until someone can get their parents’ car so you can drive into the nearest city and buy a zine or the latest album by whatever band you’re following (if there is one, you’re not even sure). You don’t have to understand anyone else or figure out how to behave or fit in. Everything is instant, so it just becomes a chorus of adoption, of co-branding and fractious, insecure commentary, with as many people chanting “This rules!” as “This sucks!”
The ultimate impossibility of pop music meaning One Thing — because of its variable subjective worth — is the bottom line. We’ve drilled down to that point, and all we’re left with is trending and revisionism. A band is “it” for a few weeks, and everyone moves on. Or, one well-written commentary in support of a previously lambasted or ignored album can change its place in history (hello Neutral Milk Hotel, that’s a guy I am still convinced nobody would ever have listened to if they hadn’t been told they should). We’ve lost the sense of personal politics that used to be associated with band allegiances, and more — and worse — the idea that a band could be musically sociopolitical. Note the preponderance of art-damaged nihilism exhibited by so many willfully “underground” bands, bands like Animal Collective. In their stubborn amorphousness and childlike, organic-chaos artwork, these bands are pointing out — though I doubt they all realize it explicitly — how overexposed and futile their intentionally private, personal music becomes the morning the Pitchfork swings their way.
Indie rock’s lost its mystique, but I don’t necessarily pine for it, because it’s finally truly possible to be DIY. People will always marvel at success, and now you can succeed on your own terms, which is all anyone ever wanted. The “alternative” movement is kind of summed up by something Melody Maker said about Shoegaze. They called it “The Scene That Celebrates Itself.” That sentence speaks to just about every indie trend we’ve seen. In the ’80s, there wasn’t that sense of outsiders or fringe people being “cool” — they were completely looked down upon — but they were fighting for validation in the face of an invalid popular movement. They were celebrating that fight, and then in the ’90s, in America, that fight was won, and it was cool to be a dissatisfied loner, which is a completely untenable position to be in. You can’t popularize independence, and we’ve been fighting that in music, the need to feel special while buying the same records as everyone else.
As much as it’s destroying the economy, the optimization of distribution and manufacturing made possible by the internet has shown us a way around that quandry, a way to make sure you can feel special buying the same records as everyone else. You eliminate the middle men you silently complied with whenever you bought a record, who diluted your dollar vote and made you the same as the person next to you in line. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah can record, press and get distribution for their album on equal footing with a record label, without ever talking to a record label. They can garner international tours and press, and they probably made about ten grand a piece, which is nothing to quit your job over — another big reality the internet has driven home: music was never something to quit your job over — but ten grand is more money than you would have ever seen from a label on sales just over six figures. Still, CYHSY are in a tough spot, because every DIY success story faces Jimmy Fallon’s backstage pitch from Almost Famous to a greater or lesser extent. Do you want to be heard by more people, or do you want to be heard by the people you want to hear you?
I can see a future where DIY bands — that abbreviation is going to have a very different connotation very soon — and the music industry will be at war. DIY bands — whether they play eight-string pitch-shifted MySpace crest-rock, or pit-stained Pitchfork-praised baby-rattle folk — will have an “authenticity” that bands with representation will not. Bands on labels, or with PR augmentation, will be viewed as lazy, or greedy, or too stupid to do it themselves, regardless of what their music sounds like, and the DIY bands will be these little autonomous cults of cool, making every cent, controlling every decision, their fans all convinced they will never betray them, and investing even more rabidly, personally, in their careers.
Until they sell out.